While the Washington Post is firmly entrenched as the ugly kid sister of the Jayson Blair Times, the Los Angeles Times has decided that it is now qualified to be the retarded family cousin that nobody talks about.

You seem to be missing the argument entirely. The discussion is not regarding the validity of including a Falluja cluster. The 100K number from the 2004 Lancet does NOT include the Falluja data. The discussion is that Kane has tried to argue that by NOT including the falluja data, the variance was underestimated, and if you allow for the much larger varience of the data when you include the Falluja data, you can calculate a 95% CI for the RR that includes a region <=1. If you dont understand that so far, I can slow down and go over it for you.

From here, Kane argues that if one includes Falluja, then one cannot reject the null hypothesis that the mortality rate stayed the same or decreased. The glaring flaw in this argument is that the presence of Falluja outliers could ONLY EVER skew the numbers higher, not lower. This is because the mortality rate in Falluja is so much higher than the distribution in the rest of the clusters, which compared to falluja are relatively close to 0 deaths per 1000. There is no possibility of the existence of a cluster with -200 to -100 deaths per 1000, because there is no such thing as a negative death. Furthermore, death rates below 2.2 per 1000 are essentially impossible in a nation. However, Kane argues that the existence of the falluja outlier increases the probability of these two cases, which we no a prior are impossible.

SomeGuysaid,

Did you click the link? Read his comment, and the paper at malkins site. There is a lot of discussion at deltoid and crookedtimber.org, but the bottem line is I’m trying to figure out where Eric got so confused when he made the comment.